Chronicle

On March 5, 2013 Oksana Kis held a presentation, entitled "Stolen Holiday: Historical Transformations of
the Meaning of March 8th, and Feminist Activism in Contemporary
Ukraine." The presentation took place at the Center for Urban
History Conference Room.

Even since delegates of the Second International Conference of
Socialist Women in Copenhagen in August 1910 unanimously supported Clara
Zetkin’s proposal to celebrate an annual Women’s Day to draw attention to
issues of equal rights for women, the meaning of the holiday changed
repeatedly.

The first part of the presentation traced the gradual transformation of the holiday's meaning in the USSR - from Day of Working Women's Solidarity in the Struggle for Equal Rights to the Holiday of Spring and Eternal Womanhood. Subsequently, the presentation focused on the practices of celebrating March 8th in post-Soviet Ukraine, and attempted to address the questions of why leaders of political parties of various cuts continued using late Soviet rhetoric and perpetuating late Soviet traditions of marking Women's Day? Does contemporary Ukraine need grassroots feminist activism, and what forms of this activism are most effective? The presentation attempted to show how aspirations to reclaim the original meaning of the holiday became a unifying factor for the women's movement in Ukraine. It discussed street public events, as well as artistic and awareness-raising initiatives aiming to revitalize the feminist tradition of marking the International Women's Day.

Oksana Kis holds a Ph. D. (Kandydat) in history, and is Senior
Research Assistant of the Institute for Ethnography, National Academy of
Sciences of Ukraine. She heads the Ukrainian Association of Women’s History
Scholars, and the "Woman and Society" Academic and Research Center.

From 1994, Kis
has been researching women’s and gender aspects within the framework of
Ukrainian history and historical ethnography; her contemporary research
interests focus on women’s oral history and women’s historical experience in
the twentieth century, and she has written a number of publications on these
topics, both in Ukraine and abroad. The second edition of her book Zhinka v tradytsiinii ukrayinskii kulturi
(druha polovyna XIX – pochatok XX st.) (Women
in Traditional Ukrainian Culture (Second Half of the Nineteenth – early
Twentieth Century)) was published in Lviv in 2012. She has co-edited
thematic issues of the Independent Culture Studies Journal Yi ("Gender Studies," No. 17, 2000, and "Femininity and
Masculinity," No. 27, 2003), as well as the "Gender Approach: History, Culture,
Society" anthology (Lviv: Klasyka, 2003). She is a member of the editing board
of "Aspasia," the international women’s history yearly. In addition, she has
developed and taught courses in oral history, gender studies, women’s history,
feminist anthropology, and women in context of post-socialist transformation.
She lives and works in Lviv.